Paleoconservative Observations

Apathy About 9/11

I was reading yet another editorial criticizing Eric Holder and the DOJ for their moronic decision to have civilian trials of KSM and other al Qaeda defendants and I was surprised and proud to learn that my cousin, Jill Regan, was there to deliver a petition against this horror:

A final observation: During the proceedings a young lady, dutifully attentive, sat with a stack of paper about 15 inches high on her lap. The papers contained names, single spaced, of some 100,000 people who signed a letter in opposition to this decision. This young woman, Jill Regan, lost her dad, Donald J. Regan, FDNY of the Bronx, who died trying to save others on 9/11. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Al.) asked that those names be entered into the record at the end of the session. It was agreed, but by that time the chairmen and most of the Democrats were already gone. I grieved for her—and for all of us—anew.

Hardcore leftists like Obama and Holder basically think that America brought 9/11 upon ourselves. They think the worst thing about this event is that we “overdid it” in our response and thereby made Europeans and other foreigners mad at us. So they rush to close GITMO, while they drag their feet on implementing their own stated Afghanistan strategy. They feel little rage at the perpetrators and consider the various foreigners with unpronounceable names killed in our attempts at vengeance indistinguishable morally and emotionally from their fellow Americans. They are at best “citizens of the world” and should not be in charge of this nation.

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The whole thing has been a hash from the gitgo: rounding up hundreds of people, some of them terrorists, some of them Taliban, more than a few who were merely sold to the US because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time – torturing them to extract confessions, releasing large numbers of them after years of confinement when the authorities decided they were not terrorists after all and now bringing the really bad guys to NYC for a civilian trial. If they are really terrorists and not POWs then they ought to receive a military trial and summary judgement, not a federal court media circus (I can’t wait to hear the prosecutors’ arguments for the admissability of confessions extracted by waterboarding!).

It won’t be used, and it won’t be admitted. Everyone knows this. It probably wouldn’t have been admitted in the military trial. Their evidence will consist mostly of wiretaps, voluntary confessions made long after (and apart from) the waterboarding, bragging on videos, various documents and other email intercepts, financial records, and things like that.

It’s true we cast a wide net in Afghanistan. So what. We should err on side of caution and have released the innocent. In fact, in some cases we’ve released the guilty too. So I can’t say I feel one teeny tiny bit of compassion for anyone down there. We’re at war; some mistakes will happen. Better to foreigners than another 9/11.

However, I can think of dozens of more deleterious aspects to this “citizen of the world” than having a slam-dunk federal trial for terrorists.

Perhaps, having just lived through 8 years of a President who routinely thrashed the constitution and bankrupted our nation, all the while invoking 9/11, I’m not as inclined to be as harsh on Obama regarding this trial as others have been.

The paleos need to get with the program on this one; the war on al Qaeda, the GITMO detentions, and the alleged round ups of foreigners are all highly legitimate and to be praised. The democracy-spreading and war in Iraq, not so much. But Bush’s bigger problems were immigration and spending, not the harassment of people who don’t deserve much in the way of presumptions of innocence or criminal procedure. Further, the occasional forays into pacifism by so-called paleoconservatives just make such people sound retarded. We believe in a national community to which we’re loyal and that deserves defense from foreign enemies. This is a fundamental principle.

Whitmoore seems to be a good example of the phenomenon among certain members of the Alternative Right that I mentioned in my comment on the Holder grilling. Note his mention of Bush’s disregard for the constition, which I am guessing means he believes that there is a connection between respecting the constition and giving these asshole terrorists the full rights of U.S. citizens in a civilian trial. Since he didn’t state a connection explicitely, maybe we should give him the benefit of the doubt, but there are certainly others on the alternative right who would make this argument. There is absolutely nothing conservative about this frame of mind, which is why I don’t feel that the Alternative Right is any significant improvement over the mainstream right, for all its many problems.

To me the only question on the war is whether it serves our national interest. Anyone that gets too worked up about al Qaeda’s human rights, the alleged harm to the Constitution, or the supposed humanitarian disaster it has brought about is generally an unserious person, and this includes the alienated Justin Raimondos and Lew Rockwells of the world.

Any conservative that is not patriotic and even somewhat of a nationalist (including the “proposition nation” neocons and the cohort of pacificst paleos) is usually an egghead or weirdo, and not to be taken too seriously.

I agree that there is a severe dearth of nationalism in this country, even on the right. I get so mad when I’m talking to libertarians and they say that free trade/immigration/outsourcing is “good for the economy.” Economists seem to have this uniquely retarded belief that the DJI or GDP is some sort of magic number that we’re trying to “level-up” in the World of Warcraft sense.

Mike, you raise a good point. I wrote about that a little while back. Basically it’s a sleight of hand to call economics value neutral social science and then also to say we can only care about system-wide efficiency rather than looking at America as having an aggregate interest, its politicians as the equivalent of manager or directors, and the other countries as our competitors. Free trade and open borders would lead to worldwide wage equalization, which would be a disaster for a wealth country like the U.S.